Filmic's entire staff laid off by parent company Bending Spoons | Hacker News Reader

Filmic's entire staff laid off by parent company Bending Spoons

petapixel.com

85 pointsjen729w40 comments

> Considered for years as the best video capture application for mobile devices…

I'm sad to see Filmic die, but as the story suggests, iOS users can now use the excellent Blackmagic Camera, made by the same folks who make a ton of great pro video hardware and the great DaVinci Resolve (macOS, Windows, Linux): https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagiccamera

Thank you for the info. It was by far the best camera app. Giving crazy raw data and pro options. It’s insane that they are laid of.

r/TIL thanks so much, I wish I had reddit_silver to give. Have a great Sunday!

The same company that bought Evernote and laid off the entire U.S. staff.

There seems to be a trend. I wonder which private equity firm is working through bending spoons? These are hallmark moves.

Oh! Right at the top of the Googles! There it is.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/nb-renaissance-invests...

Trend? I think you mean 'the norm'. Such occurrences have rarely been different.

But honestly, Evernote was at a point where VCs were tired of it, it was probably over-staffed, it's a mature product, and it's TAM wasn't that big. Companies like that are run differently and have different investors than IPO-track companies.

I developed Filmic pro in the early days though I haven’t had anything to do with it in ten years.

The market for subscription video cameras on iOS is dead and I am happy to help it stay there.

I have a set of videography tools I released last week (free camera) using what model I believe is viable and useful; truly give away the camera like Blackmagic, sell privacy focused tools to get and manage footage over the network.

I haven't posted here about them as I want to post the next update with some key features before most know, but if you need some tools have a look and let me know what you think.

> "[...]the team [...] has been let go."

no, No, NO - They were NOT "let go".

A balloon on a string, a hostage in a dungeon, a bird in a cage - these are all things that are struggling to get free and of which it can therefore be said that we "let go". But a human being who would, presumably, remain at their job if given any choice in the matter has not been "let go" - that person has been jettisoned, discarded, fired. The author does us all a disservice by hiding the truth with shallow euphemisms.

Filmic was for a while the app for turning your phone into a pseudo-pro video camera. But Blackmagic Camera wasn't the executioner - it was their own doing when they abandoned what had been a pay-once app and suddenly turned to a (quite expensive) subscription model. That didn't sit well with the community - the app's rating tanked by hundreds+ of one-star reviews. At least iOS users have BMD's camera app - Android users don't have anything comparable.

I was going to ask if there was anything comparable for Android... :(

Try something called ProShot, mcpro24fps, or MotionCam Pro - Seems like they offer the same features and more, without a subscription

I guess on Android you‘d have to look for hardware specific apps, like the one Sony is offering with their Xperia phones for example.

On Android you actually have something better than Filmic Pro, you can use something called MotionCam [Pro], which allows you to record RAW video, or optionally ProRes or HEVC (still in beta/alpha right now) in various log formats. There's also mcpro24fps for a slightly more traditional video app (free in Russian language). Between these, the video recording situation appears to be signficantly ahead of iOS even without Filmic Pro.

Thanks for pointing out these alternatives - I'll check them out!

Aren't they the same company that just bought Evernote out? I always wondered why they bought Evernote. Does anyone know?

Blackmagic basically sherlocked them with Apple's advertising support.

Evernote: chuckles I'm in danger

Is there any big corporation that doesn't fuck over their acquires?

GitHub by Microsoft went OK.

The constant outages suggest otherwise.

GitHub outages have always been fairly common, I don't think that changed since being acquired.

redhat was okay for a bit, but now its being enshittened

It’s being IBMed. That was to be expected.

Microsoft bought DOS, Excel, Powerpoint, and, effectively Word (via Xerox Alto's Bravo editor) among many others.

Adobe is a good example; their model is to fuck their customers, not the acquired companies.

GitHub, Minecraft... I'm not a big fan of Microsoft, but they do seem like a decent place to go if you're acquired.

Perhaps you've forgotten what they did at github

Yes, totally dead that site. No one is using GitHub anymore ...

They kept pretty hands off for a few years, but the last 2 or so have been getting pretty bad.

Their product designers don't even understand some of the key parts of the platform (watching vs starring a repo), which has led to all kinds of bizarre problems.

The worst part is they completely ignore user feedback:

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/65343

But to be fair, MS didn’t let those products die but developed them further. They only became really successful after Microsoft acquired them. Not comparable to the situation with Filmic IMHO.

Waze still works pretty well despite being acquired by Google years ago

It literally hasn’t been updated

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.waze

>Updated on Nov 15, 2023

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/waze-navigation-live-traffic/i...

>Version History

>4.99.1 Nov 12, 2023

any waze user will tell you that real development stopped at the acquisition with features being slowly migrated to Maps.

What's the biggest missing Waze feature in your opinion?

Stability?

[Sygic chuckles]

Have you uses the app? It hasn't changed since I started driving. It feels like its being left in maintenance mode. I am very happy it hasn't been killed off yet.

as abandonware until unceremoniously closed

Working for a company that got acquired. We're fucking ourselves over more than the acquirers are.

YouTube, Android, and DoubleClick seem to have done pretty well.

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